“I-Cut-You-Choose” Cake-Cutting Protocol Inspires Solution to Gerrymandering
cmu.edu
cmu.edu
"Impartial Automatic Redistricting... optimized for equal population and compactness only."
IMHO, more important than eliminating Gerrymandering, is eliminating the two party system. In truly competitive governments with 10-15 parties holding seats, it's incredibly risky to lie, BS, or ignore arguments. In our two party system most of the arguments are just designed to talk you out of voting at all if you favor the other party.
[1]: http://www.fairvote.org/research_electoralsystems_world
The US only has a two-party system because our method of voting ensures that it devolves into a two-party system. Our two-party system is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
Give us ranked voting and proportional representation and we'll see more than two parties emerge.
For example, Richmond and Sausalito should not be in the same district, and the Sacramento river should be a divide at least as far up as Antioch and Rio Vista.
Likewise, Vashon Island in WA should not be split across 2 congressional districts, but (since too small to be a district on its own) should be entirely in one of the districts it has a ferry connection to. And Puget Sound should be a hard divide.
The politicians would never allow it.
California has proven out the solution: collect a set of citizens from both parties as well as some unaffiliated, aggressively de-politicize the process, give them broad guidelines on how district lines should be drawn, and let them do their thing. No need for weird cake-cutting machinations.
The idea of "I cut you choose" is an incredibly inspired one because fairness is inherently built in because no participant wants to risk getting the bad side of the slicing and therefore works very hard to make it fair.
There is one surprising bias you have to be aware of. It seems if we have a state that is let's say 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, and 15% green then it would seem to be most fair for districts to have a similar composition. But this would be disastrous as in our district driven first past the post system this would mean that the party with 35% of the public support would end up receiving 100% of the congressional seats!!
Of course the desired result should be one proportional to the makeup of a state. And this is done most naturally by a system where individuals vote for a party (or individual running as a one man party) at a state level with seats distributed according to the total vote. If a state has 10 seats then 10% of the vote guarantees at least one seat. The parties then distribute their representatives to districts weighted on the vote. E.g. a district that voted for 80% democrat would be prioritized to receive a democrat representative more than one that voted 20% democrat.
The 'problem' is that if you do the above all the sudden you'd have socialists, libertarians, pirate party guys, and all other sorts with some minority representation in congress - and we can't have that can we? /s if that wasn't clear. But really, the powers that be would never agree to a system that would meaningfully undermine the establishment and so with that condition, "I Cut You Choose" does seem to be the most reasonable and realistic possibility for fair outcomes.
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More generally here, I think systems that assume bad behavior and find solutions that acceptably in spite of that tend to be vastly better than ones that assume good behavior and result in collapse when undermined. It's basically just finding game theory optimal solutions to problems.
Washington, for one, has had an independent redistricting commission since 1990.
Except that outside of a few cities, California is actually quite red. IIRC would be a red state if LA and SD were underwater.
About 50% of registered voters in the state are Democrats, and 30% Republican: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_voter_...
So yes, if you removed close to 3 million democrats from the state somehow, it would be a tie. Probably an easier method would be for Republicans to make their policies more attractive to more people.
If you’re looking at the governor race, the votes eyeball to 2.8m Dem, 1.7m Rep.
As well, it was surprising to me that you would choose to remove SD, as a Republican lead that county, though the Democrat leader there was only down by 10k (of ~400k total) votes.
Edit: 400k, not 350
On a national level this is the reason for the existence of both the electoral college and the senate. Imagine we did not have the college or senate and there was one very heavily populated state with a large group of mostly homogenous voters. Suddenly that state would be deciding every single action for the entire nation. Whether this is a good or bad thing probably depends on your views on what representation means, but it's safe to say that people in many states would feel they lacked such - which was the very reason that we rebelled against the British Empire.
Ed: Your comment elsewhere in thread about districts helped the most in realizing we were talking about different things. MB
The same thing would happen all the way up. Imagine we have two parties, again A and B, that are completely mutually exclusive - one representative always voting exactly the opposite of the other. And now imagine we have a state Massivefornia that has 1 billion voters and a proportional number of representatives, but it's split exactly 50/50. And then there's the other state, Lonely Island, with exactly 1 voter and 1 representative (who... I guess would be one and the same?). In this example, Lonely Island would decide each and every action that goes forward as Massivefornia and their 50/50 split of A/B cancels itself out on everything.
There are different ways to assign representatives in proportional representation systems, but at such small scale you could have district-wide primaries where the top N finishers for that multi-member district are slotted into seats in the order in which they finished in the primaries.
Unfortunately this system is still imperfect, as strategic voting can still occur l, but significantly less so than in our first past the post single-member system. Also it excludes extremely small parties (>10% of the national electorate) from influence. It’s a tough problem.
With a STV system like Hare-Clarke you will likely see independents standing with very centrist platforms, with the major parties quickly scrabbling to get those centrist votes.
No, unequal apportionment and the electoral college are the biggest problems, FPTP and single-member districts in state and federal legislatures are, in combination, just the biggest problem which isn't federally Constitutionally mandated and which can therefore be fixed with legislation at the appropriate level(s) without federal Constitutional Amendment.
> With a STV system like Hare-Clarke you will likely see independents standing with very centrist platforms
Perhaps, but every candidate elected being a compromise candidate that relatively few people feel they would have preferentially votred for first is horrible for representation, and that's what you get with any STV-like system with single member districts in an electorate where political views aren't unimodally distributed (and if views were unimodally distributed, FPTP would get you exactly the battle for the center you propose and you wouldn't need STV to get it.) You want compromise in the legislature on policy where the voices in the legislature reflect those in the populace to the degree feasible; you don't want the compromise to happen mechanically in selecting members of the legislature.
What do you mean?
I think the biggest problem is giving electoral votes based on total state population instead of based on citizenship.
California and Texas both end up with more than they should have.
Edit: I'd like electoral votes to be distributed proportionally instead of winner takes all - it sucks that if you are not in a swing state you have less influence.
Electors are people. They each have one vote. The result would be a very inexact whole number proportional system.
Every voter in every state would not be politically relevant or equal in presidential elections.
It would sharply increases the odds of no candidate getting the majority of electoral votes needed, leading to the selection of the president by the U.S. House of Representatives, regardless of the popular vote anywhere.
It would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote;
It would reduce the influence of any state, if not all states adopted.
It would not improve upon the current situation in which four out of five states and four out of five voters in the United States are ignored by presidential campaigns, but instead, would create a very small set of states in which only one electoral vote is in play (while making most states politically irrelevant),
It would not make every vote equal.
It would not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate with the most popular votes in the country.
The National Popular Vote bill is the way to make every person's vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees the majority of Electoral College votes to the candidate who gets the most votes among all 50 states and DC.
The current system gives "illegal immigrants" a 10 vote advantage in the Electoral College for the Democrats...because they tend to live in safe Democratic states.
An election for President based on the nationwide popular vote would eliminate the Democrat’s advantage in Electoral College members arising from the uneven distribution of non-citizens.
It's a pretty big chunk of EC votes - more than Wyoming gets in total!
The senate is meant to represent the states - not the people - so it's not really a fair comparison.
No, it's about the same. If you pull non-citizens out of the calculation nationally, California loses between 3 and 4 seats in the House.
> The senate is meant to represent the states - not the people
That's no more true than saying the House is supposed to be scaled to people and not citizens. Both are features of the design of the system. “Is supposed to be X” doesn't stop something from being a problem in terms of a goal other than X.
Sure - I guess it's the difference between a tweak and an overhaul. I'd expect the overhaul to have 100x the supporting evidence.
Mostly the Senate and it's resulting effect on the Electoral College, though granularity effects from the very small number of house seats are also an issue.
> I think the biggest problem is giving electoral votes based on total state population instead of based on citizenship.
The existence of a legal class of permanent resident non-citizens is itself a fundamental problem for the entire idea of popular government.
But even if you accept what you pose as a distortion at all, it's less significant than the disproportionality in federal legislative and executive voting power produced by the Senate and the corresponding Electoral College seats.
Why would we want a popular government?
> disproportionality in federal legislative and executive voting power produced by the Senate and the corresponding Electoral College seats.
I'm still not sure what you mean. Do you have an article you can link me to?
Overall the system works quite well, and the proportion of representatives a party has in parliament roughly aligns with first preference votes.
Naming things isn’t easy.
Quota-preferential.
Why? Two party system is a feature, not a bug.
There's something more going on in the US.
Go check the Dutch or Belgian systems. They have proportional representation and our (NL) current government is a coalition of 4 parties. (Yes, it moves slower, but also results in a more nuanced government and more gradual change)
But the UK is the classic two party system that Washington warned against.
The incumbent member of a party doing the cutting and the incumbent member of another party doing the choosing.
whatever solution comes out of that will be most liable to help incumbency.
In each round, I reckon the optimal strategy for the "cut" will likely be the same as partisan cuts are now; densely pack the opposition's supporters into a small number of districts, while slicing the rest up to have a small but stable majority for one's own party.
This gives the opposition the chance to choose/freeze either a district they know they'll win, or a district they're pretty sure they won't win. I would choose the one I know my party would win, and redraw to pack all my opposition's voters into as few districts as possible.
If this is repeated a few times, the map ends up with many safe districts for each party and a small number of "left-overs" which will be contested. This means parties will have an incentive to concentrate on the small number of voters in the few contestable districts, at the expense of probably the majority of voters. It doesn't seem like a recipe for every vote counting and voters' voices being listened to.
If we break up monopoly businesses when the lack of choice increases the cost to consumers, should we also break up monopoly parties when the lack of choice increases the "cost" in time and effort that voters must "spend" to get their issues dealt with?
An analogous tactic against this "I-cut-you-freeze" task might be to provide especially appealing district boundary for your opponent to freeze, while harbouring some knowledge about that district that that your opponent is unaware of (eg suppose that you know the trajectory of demographic changes much better than your opponent)
1. The party with more knowledge about how people vote can game the system. This is not a desirable feature of an electoral system.
2. This proposed method depends on a two-party system. There are cake cutting methods for more parties, but they take arbitrarily long to solve.
1. Arbitrarily choose an order
2. Repeat while not everyone has a slice:
a. First person without a slice cuts a slice
b. Each other person, in order, who's without a slice may either take the slice or pass it
c. If everyone else has passed, the cutter must take that slice
It's quadratic time -- worst case you go fully around the (remaining) circle for every slice -- but that's still not a very big number even for four or five political parties. How many parties are there actually going to be?
(I'm not exactly sure how this maps to the article's scheme, either; the point is that I'm not sure it's all that complex.)
Your suggested algorithm seems to be unfair because the first party to choose has a clear advantage over the parties who choose later and did not cut: depending on the order of the parties there is also likely to be collusion.
The immediately easiest (and politically realistic) way to game your system is to split yourself into multiple parties and then cut your allies/sock puppets a massive slice.
This is true. Many things don't naturally cut into two equal pieces despite the person's best attempts, and in certain cases it may be impossible. (For example, if there is are "valuable" toppings that are indivisible.)
It is just plain easier to choose than to cut. The worst case choice for the person choosing is that they are indifferent to which piece they get, but the worst case for the person cutting is that they get a worse piece.
Choosing is strictly always better than cutting.
How to do that? Use the ray casting solution to the Point in Polygon problem. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon)
If there is any point within the boundary that has to cross the boundary more than 3 times to get to a point outside of the boundary, then the proposed congressional district is too complex. if it crosses 4 times (or any even number), the point isn't actually within the boundary to begin with. Crossing the boundary 3 times still allows for some concavity, but 5 is kinda ludicrous.
Districts should be compact, as simply shaped as possible, equally populated, and ideally follow as many lines of local government concern as possible.
We already have utility districts, school districts, city precincts, county precincts, townships, drainage and levee districts, cities, towns, villages, counties, wards, neighborhoods, state police districts, state House districts, state Senate districts, and more boundary lines within states. Rather than one county precinct being cut into four parts so each can be a portion of four different Congressional districts that also overlap other county precincts, perhaps as much as possible your part of town should have the same candidates on the Congressional race as your neighbors using the same voting station.
If you are voting for the mayor of a city, just count every single vote of the citizens. Why do you first need to split up the people into arbitrary groups, and then count the group outcomes?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematics-o...
- Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)
I think the truth in this humor is quite relevant to those in whom you're placing your hope.
That's absolutely the wrong thing to wait around for, since the world will burn while you wait.
OK, maybe humans will eventually be perfected. In the meantime, we need solutions we can implement with the humans we have now.
Human factor and stupidity excluded.